Jack London: Socialist author/racist jag

Jack London was born on this day in 1876. His books like Call of the Wild are required reading for many school students, and Roger Ebert gave the 1991 adaptation of White Fang, starring Ethan Hawke, three stars out of four. But not as many of us are as familiar with his works on socialism, or his tirades against Asians and African-Americans. Some of those writings were used be Ken Burns in his 2005 documentary of the boxer Jack Johnson, Unforgivable Blackness, as an example of the white America’s hatred of the boxing champion: